Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

Dana Loesch, the conservative radio talk show host and spokeswoman for the NRA, has cut several videos promoting the pro-Second Amendment group, sometimes with such cutting commentary as to arouse the ire of her intended targets. The latest one that surfaced last Thursday was aimed directly at the mouthpiece of the liberal establishment: The New York Times.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, August 3, 2017:

Factory Automation with industrial robots for palletizing food products like bread and toast at a bakery in Germany,

SAM, the Semi-Automated Mason, can be seen on YouTube laying bricks alongside human masons. While SAM can, according to contractors, lay around 2,000 bricks a day compared to an average of 600 to 700 for a human mason, the video illustrates a key point missed by many: It shows human workers programmming SAM and providing it the bricks and mud and following behind cleaning up after it. In other words, SAM, produced by Construction Robotics, isn’t replacing masons, it is making them more efficient and saving their backs.

A year ago, Rick Cohen, the founder of Symbotic LLC, which develops autonomous robots for warehouses, said,

Candidate Donald Trump repeatedly promised that he would, if elected president, withdraw from the Paris Agreement agreed to under the previous administration in 2015. He said, “We are going to cancel the Paris climate agreement [and] stop all payments of the United States tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”

Under that agreement (not a treaty which then-President Obama claimed wouldn’t need Senate ratification), so-called global warming would be limited by slashing carbon dioxide and other emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and concentrating instead on green energy development.

One sign that Trump intends to keep his promise followed the official dispatch from the G7 Summit in Sicily on Friday:

During a conference call that followed the official announcement on Monday that Ford’s CEO Mark Fields was going to retire — his position to be taken by the head of Ford’s autonomous vehicle division — the company’s executive chairman, Bill Ford, said, “This is a time of unprecedented change. And time of great change, in my mind, requires a transformational leader. And thankfully we have that in Jim.”

When ride-sharing company Uber bought Otto, the company developing autonomous car driving software, last August, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said the purchase was “existential” to the company: “The world is going to go self-driving and autonomous … a million fewer people are going to die a year [worldwide]. Traffic in all cities will be gone. [There will be] significantly reduced pollution and trillions of hours will be given back to people — quality of life goes way up. Once you go, “All right, there’s a lot of upsides there” … If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by.”

Jared Kushner’s father-in-law, Donald Trump, gave him an early birthday present, naming him to his new administration as a senior advisor on Monday. The next day Kushner turned 36.

Married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka (shown), Kushner responded to the “all hands on deck” message following Trump’s nomination at the Republican National Convention last summer. Kushner dropped everything and started building a national political campaign from scratch. Blessed with precious little political experience, but with smarts (degrees from Harvard and New York University), Kushner saw the problem: no staff, no money, no experience, no strategy, no nothing. So he called on some of his contacts in social networking, asking for referrals to the brightest and the best to help.

He found Brad Parscale, a web designer in San Antonio, and built a team of 100 people around him. Calling the team “Project Alamo,” the two learned the ropes quickly: traditional TV, radio, and print advertising were 1) expensive, and 2) not very effective in reaching the people Trump needed to win. Instead, through trial and error, Kushner spent less and less on TV and radio and focused on the social networking tools Facebook and Twitter. Said Kushner:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, January 10, 2017:

Jared Kushner

President-elect Donald Trump named his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior advisor in his administration on Monday:

Jared has been a tremendous asset and trusted advisor throughout the campaign and transition and I am proud to have him in a key leadership role in my administration.

He has been incredibly successful in both business and politics. He will be an invaluable member of my own team as I set and execute an ambitious agenda, putting the American people first.

The anti-Trump media jumped at the chance to question Trump’s decision, claiming that it violated anti-nepotism rules put in place after President John F. Kennedy named his brother, Robert Kennedy, as attorney general.

Jamie Gorelick, an attorney advising Trump and Kushner on the matter, said there’s little to be concerned about:

As Donald Trump opened Wednesday’s meeting with the dozen or so executives from the technology industry, all was sweetness and light:

You are a truly amazing group of people. There’s nobody like you in the world. In the world! There’s nobody like the people in this room. [Anything we] can do to help this go along, we’re going to be there for you.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, October 17, 2016:

John Podesta

As part of just-inaugurated President Obama’s new foreign policy to improve relations between the United States and Russia, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in March 2009. Meeting in her hotel’s Salon Panorama in Geneva, she presented him with a small gift box containing a bright red button symbolizing the Obama administration’s desire to “reset” the relationship between the two governments.

Thus began an effort to transfer American technology to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own “Silicon Valley,” called Skolkovo.

The Chinese invitation extended to senior executives at major Silicon Valley firms was no invitation but a command: Be there, or lose any chance to exploit business opportunities in China.

The annual Seattle conference in the past has been primarily directed to midlevel management at companies such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. But this year, taking advantage of China’s President Xi Jinping’s planned visit with President Obama, the date of the conference was moved up, and the invitation/command was extended to the senior executive officers. The carrot offered was a presentation by Xi himself.

The threat was reiterated, for anyone who didn’t get the message, in an interview the Wall Street Journal did with Xi:

When Roger Ebert reviewed the film Sleeping with the Enemy upon its release in 1991, he called it “a slasher movie in disguise, an up-market version of the old exploitation formula where the victim can run, but she can’t hide.”

When the Chinese government invited top executives from 15 Silicon Valley companies to attend its annual Seattle conference, those executives most likely didn’t consider themselves victims, but honored guests. They would shortly learn their error:

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Internet censorship czar, Lu Wei, are learning that Princess Leia was right when she said in the movie Star Wars about extending increasing totalitarian political control, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

When Wei visited Silicon Valley heavyweights last December, he noted that Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had an anthology of President Xi’s speeches on his desk. Included in that book was a speech in which Xi laid out his vision of the Chinese Internet:

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Thursday, February 26, 2015:

Ronald Reagan was right:

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: if it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Tom Wheeler, the current FCC Chairman, doesn’t think that’s funny. He thinks they are his marching orders. Encouraged by his boss, Wheeler is reaching for the biggest hammer in his toolbox to bludgeon the internet into submission and turn it into a utility. On Thursday Wheeler will

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, October 10, 2014:

First generation Roomba (Roomba is a trademark of iRobot). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The next wave of technological robots is here. When the Roomba iRobot made its grand entrance a few years ago, it was considered clever but expensive. Now, however, it is taking a big bite out of the $12 billion annual vacuum cleaner business as its technology continues to improve and its prices come down. According to Roomba, there is

This article first appeared at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, October 9, 2014:

Last month, Mercedes-Benz unveiled its “Future Truck 2025,” an essentially driverless over-the-road tractor-trailer rig that the company expects will revolutionize the trucking industry within the next 10 years, if not sooner. While only a prototype, the company is investing millions in the concept expecting that inside the next decade driverless rigs will be commonplace not only in the United States but across the world.

With Apple’s announcement of its new iPhone 6 10 days ago also came the announcement of an upgrade of its operating software – the iOS 8 – that now makes it impossible for law enforcement to break the code and retrieve the phone’s private information, even if it has a search warrant. On its website, Apple said:

Using the power of the bully pulpit as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Michigan Senator Carl Levin attacked Caterpillar on Tuesday for using loopholes in the law to save the company an estimated $2.4 billion in taxes since 2000. Executives from Caterpillar as well as the company’s accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) were called on the carpet for

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Thursday, December 19th, 2013:

For some reason the first anniversary of the Newtown shooting came and went without fanfare, despite the Colorado shooting the day before that would ordinarily have amped up the media’s anti-gun rhetoric once again.

The silence was almost deafening. On Saturday, the LA Times had a couple of articles about the Colorado shooting while USA Today noted on Monday that Colorado Governor Hickenlooper had visited one of those grievously wounded in the attack. Google news had nothing